Voting for Round 4 of Project Food Blog is now open! Your votes and support have helped me get to this point, and I’d truly appreciate it if you could help me go one step further to Round 5! I have a fabulous pizza idea to share with all of you for that challenge. :) Please cast your vote today using this link or the widget on the left sidebar. Thank you so much! - Kimberly

After a solid week of hearing, “Sorry, we’re not hiring right now,” I was beyond stoked to find out I had made it through to the fourth round of this competition (thanks so much to all of you who have helped me get this far!). It was just the news I needed to perk up my wilted spirits. But the news also left me beyond stumped when it came to deciding what to do for this next round because it is way outside my comfort zone. This week’s challenge is called “Picture Perfect”. Well, I like taking pictures of food, so that seems easy enough. Then they hit me with this: create a step-by-step instructional photo tutorial.

*gulp*

Sure, it might seem easy to some so my panic may appear to be a bit ridiculous. But I’m one of those “writing-centric” bloggers who paints pictures with her words and uses photos to accent those words, not the other way around. I am a natural story-teller and I love that my writing engages my readers and keeps them coming back for more. That and the fact that I live alone with two cats whose paws don’t sport those ever-so-handy opposable thumbs to help with the in-progress shots, made this challenge even more intimidating to me. For days, I stewed, I fretted, I tossed and I turned, trying to decide what exactly to post for this particular round of the competition.

I was just about to launch into a daunting step-by-step tutorial on the intricacies of doro wat, when the giant pile of heirloom tomatoes I’d just scored from my choir mate Milt’s farm caught my eye. Of course! I could make an incredible pasta sauce completely from scratch, using real tomatoes instead of those inferior canned ones. Not everyone has access to some of the spices needed to make that Ethiopian delight, and I wanted to post something that anyone, regardless of cooking skill, could try at home. Since I’d already had my heart set on something spicy and had a couple of perfectly hot little peppers growing in my own little garden, I decided to make a fiery arrabbiata sauce to go with some freshly cooked penne. Once again my berbere spices were put away and I set about making a completely different, but equally delicious spicy dish that featured what I consider to be one of the most perfect foods on the planet: tomatoes.

I love tomatoes like a little kid loves cake and I can never, ever seem to get enough. Legend has it that when I was a wee tot just out of my first day of pre-school, my two biggest complaints were: A) there were no swings in the playground, and B) there were no tomatoes in my salad at lunchtime. I still consider both of these to be capital offenses and I actually suffer through tomato withdrawals whenever they’re not in season. You know, when those waxy, bland, pink excuses start invading the produce department at local stores and you’re left wondering if what you just ate was even a distant second cousin to the tomato. And there actually used to be times when I’d would ask coworkers if I could bum and/or buy a tomato off them if I happened to be faced with tomato-less lunch fare (Oh, dear God, I can’t believe I just admitted that).

So a day at the Whaley Farm was pretty much like a day at Disneyland for me. There, I helped Milt pick, process and pack a veritable rainbow of different tomatoes, from Lemon Boys to Green Zebras to Purple Russians. After a full day of working behind-the-scenes at a tomato farm and enjoying a lovely dinner with Milt and his family, I was sent home with my own large bundle of fine heirloom tomatoes. I had every intention of just eating them on their own or throwing them in salads, but a thick, rich arrabbiata seemed like a much better idea.

Arrabbiata means “angry” in Italian, and the sauce was dubbed with this name because of the fiery addition of hot peppers. There are a ton of recipes out there for making this with canned tomatoes, but that almost seems sacrilegious to me; why do that to a pasta sauce when you can make one the right way? Sure, processing your own fresh tomatoes takes a bit more time and you get to make a glorious mess in the kitchen while doing so; but the end result is completely worth the effort.

So without further ado in the “words” department, let’s check out how to make a delicious arrabbiata sauce step-by-step, from vine to table.

Whew! Mission accomplished! As you can see, I stayed true to my regular PGEW style and pretty much deconstructed my usual recipe method by adding pictures. Though the lighting in my kitchen is rather horrendous and the batteries in my “good” camera died right before I set about working on this post, I still think I was able to clearly convey the process of making a homemade pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes. Like I said before, it’s one thing to make a pasta sauce “from scratch” using canned goods; it’s quite another to make it from scratch.

And even if it took me a few hours to do all of this by myself, working as both chef and photographer (cooking with your non-dominant hand while trying to properly engage the shutter button with the other as cats wind between your legs trying to trip you because you’ve ignored them all day is definitely what I’d call a “challenge”), I must say I’m proud of the fact that I was able to do it all by myself with my own two hands. From the picking to the processing to the photographing, everything in this post is 100% me; no special equipment or anything. Just Poor Girl doing the best that she can with what she has on hand.

And you know what? That’s what my blog has always been about: making the most of a potentially scary situation. I hope it inspires you to do the same in your own endeavors! Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this recipe post, please take the time to cast your vote for PGEW starting at 6am Pacific time on October 11th. As always, I will provide a special post with a link to the voting page, but you can also vote for me by using the widget on the left sidebar. Thanks in advance! - Kimberly

Enjoyed this Post?

Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!

I discovered my complete and total adoration of heirloom tomatoes this summer…and now I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be able to do without them until next year. Man it's going to be a long winter. This pasta sauce looks absolutely fantastic!

Beautiful job as always–and I love the progression of the photos from where the produce was picked to the final product on the plate. Kudos! You definitely deserve to move on to the next round. I will be voting for you tomorrow.

Simple, yet well illustrated step-by-step photos and instructions. I loved your story so sweet, about your childhood, and your love of tomatoes. Your photos belong in a cooking magazine, for sure. Such beautiful and meticulous work. For sure, I am voting for you!

I enjoyed the labor of your posts as I can so identify. Despite a daughter who is a great photographer and another who is a fabulous cook; both seem determined to not vest themselves in assisting with my food blogging efforts so I struggle with two dogs waiting at the ready for every crumb and a limited ability to manage some of those erstwhile fab shots I see on other blogs.

Oh wow that looks so delicious. I've always wanted to make my own sauce completely from scratch but never knew how. Thank you for the easy to understand instructions and pictures. The sauce looks absolutely delicious. Great job!

What a lovely tribute to the glorious tomato. I feel the same way as you do when tasteless tomatoes that are waaay out of season are all that's available to buy (and sometimes, I'll admit, I do buy them). When they're at their peak, though, what better thing to do with them than make a sauce like this

Great job! I totally know what you mean about cooking with one hand and photographing with the other! I've learned how to take pictures with my left hand while cooking with my right. It's not the prettiest, but it works! Or sometimes I'll put the camera on top of a random bookshelf and use the self timer.